Friday, May 2, 2014

The Letter House

Today I am so exited to share my love for The Letter Housewith you. Autumn, my extremely talented best friend, and Stephanie, her
extremely talented friend teamed up to create this beautiful custom shop. Through The Letter House you can purchase prints, invitations, branding, and you have the ability to create custom pieces. I recently bought their "Greatest Adventure" print to hang in our bedroom and cannot wait to get another!

I sat down with the fantastic duo to learn more on how they came together, what they offer, and their future goals.

1) Let's start at the beginning! How did the two of you come together to create The Letter House?

We first met through a mutual friend about two years ago. We instantly became friends and bonded over our creative passions. Fast forward about a year later we found ourselves unsatisfied with our jobs and seeking more creative freedom and autonomy. I mean who doesn't want to be their own boss, right? We began to realize our similar visions and goals for the future, and how our skills compliment each other creatively. That's when our idea for The Letter House was born. After months of dreaming, planning and lots of hard work we officially launched in September of 2013. We've had a blast so far, meeting and working with lots of great people and every day we feel so blessed to be doing what we love.

2) What are your roles within the business?

We believe one of the strong points of our company is the differences in our skills and backgrounds that we bring to the table. We both studied and went to school for different things and believe that this collaboration makes our work unique, innovative, and ultimately stronger than our work would be on it's own. Stephanie's expertise and background is in graphic design, specifically layout and typographic arrangements, and works mostly with the technical design on the computer. Autumn specializes in hand-lettering and illustration, with her heartbeat in creating new letter forms to use on various projects. While Stephanie is afraid of picking up a pencil, Autumn can't get enough of drawing and sketching. Together we work to create beautiful, custom designs that reflect the people we work with. We work well together to tackle the day-to-day happenings of our business, like responding to emails or shipping out orders.

3) Where do you pull inspiration from?

The beauty of what we do is that inspiration can come from almost anywhere! Because most of what we do requires working one-on-one with clients, we find it incredibly important to draw most of our inspiration from them. Their wedding, their business, their ideas, even what they wear… all of this is in the forefront of our mind when designing for our clients. The truth is, we get to work with some pretty awesome people doing some pretty awesome stuff, so naturally we're going to be inspired by them! Being based out of and obsessed with the state of Arizona we also draw inspiration from the local culture and beautiful surroundings we see every day.

4) We see that you can customize. How does that process work? Are there limits?

Yes! We have our online shop but most of the work we do is actually for custom clients. The bulk of our custom work is for weddings. We have three different wedding packages we offer for brides with budgets and needs of all shapes and sizes. We also offer custom logo design and branding for businesses. No matter what the project, we begin by meeting with our clients to discuss their design ideas and gather inspiration to begin working. (For out of state clients, we do this a number of ways via Skype, email, etc.) From there we get to the drawing board, coming up with initial ideas and sketches to send over. This is where Autumn might hand letter something that is then scanned and turned into digital artwork that will be incorporated into our final design. The beauty of our customization process is that the sky is the limit! We don't stop until we're all thrilled about the final product.

5) What are future goals you have for The Letter House?

We're always thinking of ways to improve our craft and our company. In the future, we're excited about offering some new, more luxurious custom products featuring unique letterpress printing. We're also working on developing and launching new products in our online shop. Ultimately, we're just so grateful to be doing what we love and look forward to growing our business and clientele.

I had to share my guest book with you that Autumn made for our wedding. She made it such a smooth process and it came out just like we wanted! Her hand lettering is absolutely stunning.